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Friday, April 24, 2015

Kentucky's new science standards bring a giant shift toward science and engineering practices. Eight major practices are to be applied across
physical science, life science, earth and space science, and
engineering:

Those
practices aren't an alternative to content knowledge: students will
still need to read, write, study, and thing about scientific insights
developed over centuries and those emerging now from current research.

Instead,
the practices demand that the content knowledge move off of the
textbook page (out of the lecture notes, beyond the PowerPoint slides)
and into active thinking and work. Each page of the standards begins
with statements that "students who demonstrate understanding can" do specific
things. As illustrations, the middle school standards say call for
students to be able to "undertake a design project to construct, test,
and modify a device that either releases or absorbs thermal energy by
chemical processes" and "analyze and interpret data to provide evidence
for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of
organisms in an ecosystem."

For student learning, that
will require a big realignment to focus on puzzling through big issues
and practical applications and building increasingly skilled use of each
practice. For example, with Practice 1 (asking questions), students
may start with open-ended puzzling about phenomena they've observed, but
then they'll need to learn to move smoothly into focusing their
inquiries on testable questions. For Practice 3 (planning and carrying
out investigations), those questions will need to be framed in terms of
variables and controls. The standards also provide progressions from
grade to grade, so that students develop expertise over the years--but
even the youngest are involved in regular, lively work to develop rich
insight into the natural world.

In turn, for the
community at large, this shift in science expectations creates a new
puzzle: what kind of evidence will show us that students are developing
those practices? It seems hard, probably impossible, for
machine-scored tests to give us real insight. If we want to know how
students are doing, we may indeed need to find innovative ways to check
on this deeper learning. To succeed, we may have to take on very active
roles in defining problems (Practice 1), designing solutions (Practice
6), and making arguments from evidence (Practice 7).